Forty Years of Blood, Sweat, and Tears

I started My career in Environmental Engineering, 40 years ago to this day on February 12, 1979. The Blood and Tears are for dramatic effect to catch your attention: Sweat and toil it certainly has been.

The very first job interview I attended was at Thermax in Pune, courtesy my batchmate from IIT Madras – Nitin Warty who was the blue eyed boy of Mr. Rohinton Aga himself. I consider it my great good fortune that we could not see eye to eye : else I would have been foisting ill conceived, absurd, bastardised MBBR STPs on unsuspecting customers. An MBBR with no primary sedimentation ; An MBBR with garden variety cooling tower plastic media as carrier material; An MBBR with, horror of horrors a tube setter for secondary sedimentation of biomass (no doubt from a Water treatment Chemical sludge mindset) ; and an MBBR with an even more abominable contrivance – sludge recirculation. If this had been anywhere else but in India, I would be put behind bars for life for unprofessional conduct and malpractice for causing grave danger to the Environment, great disservice to society and the Nation, bordering on criminality.

I then joined Dorr-Oliver in Andheri, Bombay on February 12, 2019, literally at the flick of the wrist of Mr. T R Krishna Rao – head honcho of Dorr- Oliver India. Read all about that story here :

Since then I have travelled the length and breadth of India during my stint at Dorr, the Middle Eastern countries during my next stint with Voltas International. And since 1986, as part of Ecotech, I have travelled extensively in India, Nepal, Srilanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc. You can read about these experiences and the funnier side of these travels in my blogsite: http://travailsofanenvironmentalengineer.blogspot.com/

And now at Ecotech I have a wonderful bunch of team mates many of whom have travelled this journey with me for 25 years and more and helped build Ecotech as a highly respected Company known as much for its technical brilliance, as for its uncompromising professional Integrity.

Now with Branch offices in Pune and Mangalore already functional, and soon in Hyderabad and Chennai, we look forward to extending our expertise to these large metros to Treat, Recycle and Reuse Wastewater – a concept totally alien, a goal too far in the minds of a vast majority of STP and ETP owners in India and indeed the very purveyors of such STPs and ETPs, and sad to say even the very enforcers of Environmental laws in India.

Happily No Blood, No tears - All sweat. That is the story of Ecotech. My 40 + years of journey has been meticulously tracked by the Ministry of External Affairs in the rogues gallery photos attached. And now so can you from the time I entered the hallowed portals of Olin Hall in Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.